So I had an interesting evening the other night. I went to the third annual (at least I think this is the third year) of the Librarian Meet & Greet which is in conjunction with the Emerald City Writer’s Conference. Don’t ask me how the conference was, as I didn’t go this year. But I did make it to the Librarian gathering as it is too much fun:  essentially our hostess with the mostess, Deborah Schneider of the King County Library System–seen here, and the esteemed Mary Buckham gather together librarians from western Washington, get them all in a room and then we “speed date.” The authors sit at tables divided by subgenre and the librarians move from table to table so they get to meet all of us. Debbie rings her trusty bell, and everyone shifts–well, the librarians do, we authors sit and wait for our new victims, er dates.

The authors go all out and fill bags of goodies and the librarians go all out, peppering us with questions and promising to buy copious amounts of our books.  Remember, librarians, you promised. Most of us had seen the recent Stephen Colbert spoof on libraries being the cause of our economic woes because they. . . shudder. . . don’t charge for their services, and the libraries here in Seattle are like most of the libraries in the country and have seen increases in service requests go up as much as 33 percent. Being no novice or sloucher where it comes to using my library, all I can say is, “What took you all so long?!!” I’m a library girl and proud of it.

I shared a table with Julia Quinn and Gerri Russell. Now I think Gerri (who just go back from a glorious trip to Scotland, lucky wench!) had this whole Scottish vibe going, because before we knew it, there as this Scotsman at our table. That, or there was Speed Dating for Scots down the hall and he just hit the wrong room. And no, we didn’t ask him how authentic his kilt was, but he did say he didn’t ride his scooter when he wore his kilt–so we sort of concluded the answer to that one.

Now you might think meeting a man in a kilt was the highlight of my night, but no, my highlight was a much more vain–as it was, my KCLS Read poster was there, and so I got to show off (along with Serena Robar) my READ poster. Here we are with the talented and wonderful J, the print god of KCLS. J is a real kick and awful nice–he always comes to the Romance Meet & Greet because his wife is a HUGE romance fan, so she tags along to meet us all, and then we hit on J to get him to us our books in library print media.  It worked for me, as he used one of my book covers in one of the Valentine Day promos last year. Believe me, that is huge, because there are 43 libraries in the system, and the circulation makes it the 3rd largest library system in the country.

The genius behind this READ project is Darcy over at Bellevue Regional Library, who has spent the last year cajoling her co-workers, famous local folks, any author she could point her camera at, and regular old patrons into posing for their READ campaign posters holding their favorite books. The posters are really cute and use different cartoon graphics depending on the subject. This was very special to me because some of my earliest memories are of my mom taking us to the library once a week to pick out books. I even worked in my local library while I was in high school. Now I am a poster child. Sort of cool, huh?

Live Interview, Call In – Win an Autographed book! 

Yes, I’m going to be on the radio (internet radio, that is) Tuesday evening (October 14th) at 8:30 pm Eastern time and would love to have you call in and ask a question or just say hi. The call in number is 646-200-4071, and if you get through and get your question on the air, I’ll send you an autographed copy of one my Avon books. If you are too shy to call in, you can just listen in over the internet or join the online chat. All the specifics can be found on my Events page.

So what book would you be holding for your Read poster? And have you marked your calender for tomorrow night to chat?